“That!” answered the man, indifferently. “Why, that’s milk from the cows you fellows have been bringing in to-day.”
“Cows! Do you mean seal-mothers? Where are their young?”
“What! the pups? Back on the rookeries, of course.”
“And what will become of them?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose they’ll die after a while. But what ails you? Be you sick?” With this the man paused for a moment in his work and gazed curiously at Phil’s pale face.
“Sick! Yes, I am sick at heart!” cried the conscience-stricken lad, before whose mental vision was flashing a vivid picture of the helpless and starving pups whose mothers he had slaughtered that day. He seemed to hear their pitiful little voices growing weaker and weaker with each hour as they called in vain for those who would never return to them. He seemed to see them dying, after days of suffering, and for a moment he felt all the horror that comes to him who has committed a murder.
He was restored to his surroundings by Captain Duff’s loud voice calling out: “Hello, Ryder! Here’s your bonus; for you’re high line to-day. If ye’ll only do as well to-morrow and the day after, I’ll promise to start ye for Sitka by steamer afore the week’s out.”
Thus saying, the speaker extended towards the lad the reward he had promised for that day’s butchery—a ten-dollar gold piece.
With a cry of rage and a savage motion Phil snatched the glittering coin, and with all his might flung it from him into the sea. Then confronting the amazed man with blazing eyes and a wrathful voice, he almost screamed: “Did you think I would take your blood-money? I’ve sunk as low as murder, I know, but not so low as to take pay for it! And bad as I am, you are a thousand times worse, for I did not know what I was doing, while you knew all the time and urged me on. But never, so long as I live, will I take the life of another of those harmless creatures. Never! never!”